ProTools and outboard gear. How do you do it?

[trtzbass]

I love my ProTools. Love mixing in it, love working with it.
What I don't love is the gymnastics one has to do to use outboard gear. I mean where I am now I am using a convoluted signal routing to pass the audio through my Lunchbox and then back in the interface (an Audient ID22); then I have to align it manually, which is not the most accurate way to do this.
As you know good 'ol PT has these two drawbacks when it comes to using external hardware:
1) There is no automatic delay compensation like in every other major DAW (where you send a ping in and it calculates the delay)
2) If you want to do it the proper way, manually measuring the delay and telling PT to nudge the audio of that many ms, you have to have an input - output pair that has the same number, (output 1 - 2 to input 1 - 2, etc).
I've had quite a few audio interfaces now and almost all of them had staggered I / Os because Output 1 and 2 are generally dedicated to send the sound to the speakers.
Every major DAW allows you to decide what I/O use for the FX loop, but not PT. I think UAD'a Apollo has a 'Pro Tools mode' because of that.

If you have more or less my same setup, do you have any strategies to get the job done in an accurate way? Am I missing something here ?

[dellboy]

I love my ProTools. Love mixing in it, love working with it.
What I don't love is the gymnastics one has to do to use outboard gear. I mean where I am now I am using a convoluted signal routing to pass the audio through my Lunchbox and then back in the interface (an Audient ID22); then I have to align it manually, which is not the most accurate way to do this.
As you know good 'ol PT has these two drawbacks when it comes to using external hardware:
1) There is no automatic delay compensation like in every other major DAW (where you send a ping in and it calculates the delay)
2) If you want to do it the proper way, manually measuring the delay and telling PT to nudge the audio of that many ms, you have to have an input - output pair that has the same number, (output 1 - 2 to input 1 - 2, etc).
I've had quite a few audio interfaces now and almost all of them had staggered I / Os because Output 1 and 2 are generally dedicated to send the sound to the speakers.
Every major DAW allows you to decide what I/O use for the FX loop, but not PT. I think UAD'a Apollo has a 'Pro Tools mode' because of that.

If you have more or less my same setup, do you have any strategies to get the job done in an accurate way? Am I missing something here ?

Your setup is not something I am familiar with, but to get someone to help you who does know it might be helpful to give more details.

Does your lunchbox just house FX, and what make is it, and what modules are you running?

Are you plugging your outboard gear directly into that, or is there a mixer involved somewhere in the chain that you plug your guitar/keyboard etc into?

What version of ProTools are you using?